Do you ever get so mad that you want to punch something? I'm here for you. My name is Punch Me Panda.

If you find yourself frustrated, angry, or just had a bad day, I will come to your house, and you can punch me. I wear a chest protector, and you wear boxing gloves, so no one gets hurt. It costs one cent per punch.

I am sympathetically masochistic, so you can hit me as hard as you can.

Newsweek on this photographic "masterpiece" found at a garage sale (detail above):

The best part of this photograph, [collector John] Foster says, is the contrast between the twins' formality and the kid in the window frame (at right). "Put your finger over the the kid backing out of or climbing into the window, and you have a normal photograph," he says. "But that boy is the big exclamation point on this posed, straightforward image. It's absolutely nutty."

11.26.2010

• Picture Black Friday is "an open call for photographers throughout the U.S. to go out and produce images that document Black Friday -- how you see it, on your terms." Submissions accepted through Dec. 5.

• PDN: "To cheer up his 91-year-old Hungarian grandma, Frederika, French photographer Sacha Goldberger took a series of photographs with her wearing various crazy costumes in different poses. While the photographs are purposefully surrealistic, Frederika Goldberger is a hero, having saved lives during World War II. "

• Ben Davis at Artnet: "The movement of art and art criticism, as I have come to see it, is a movement of threading, of finding the points where art and its world connect back to everything else, the big, beautiful, sometimes fucked up and scary world beyond it. If you can’t stomach being interested in the wider world and having a thought about it, and figuring out how that relates back to what artists are doing in the present, then all you are left with is meaningless professional opinion, of interest mainly to other art professionals or those in their spell. "

• Pomplamoose -- the duo that does excellent, quirky multi-track (looped? multi-layer video?) covers of everything from Beyonce and Lady Gaga to The Chordettes -- just made Hyundai's new holiday TV commercial.

Minnesota's 2007 "concealed-carry" law allows permit-holding gun owners to carry an unlimited number of handguns on their person in public except for certain cases and when businesses specifically post their policy banning guns on site. While Flickr users -- including Kelly Haferman, Geoffrey Brown, Kerim (1, 2, 3) and Jeff Houck -- have documented many of these ubiquitous signs, I haven't seen any contemporary art photographers address the topic. Have you? Please let me know in comments. Or if you find any examples of hand-made or uniquely designed signs, send them my way.

• Slavoj Zizek, in a statement accompanying a portrait in Steve Pyke's series of photos of philosophers: "I HATE philosophy, but I cannot find peace if I do not get rid of a philosophical problem. Philosophy is or me like women: they are impossible, but it is even more difficult without them."

• NYT: “Because Obama’s presidency seems to many to not have lived up to its promise of a different, progressive way of doing things, people have perhaps pulled away from his font,” said Robert Arnow, a font designer in San Francisco. “For the most part, the fonts chosen by candidates do not take chances, but rather tend toward what’s been done the past.”

• Japanese-American dance legends Eiko and Koma are performing Naked naked in the Walker galleries, six days a week through Nov. 30. Here's the Star Tribune's writeup of it.